THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
AND ITS HERITAGE
Politics, Society and Economy
EDITED BYSURAIYA FAROQHI AND HALIL INALCIK
Advisory Board
Fikret Adanir • Idris Bostan • Amnon Cohen • Cornell Fleischer Barbara Flemming • Alexander de Groot • Klaus Kreiser Hans Georg Majer • Irene Melikoff • Ahmet Ya§ar Ocak Abdeljelil Temimi • Gilles Veinstein • Elizabeth Zachariadou
THE OTTOMANS
AND
THE BALKANS
A Discussion of Historiography
EDITED BYFIKRET ADANIR
ANDSURAIYA FAROQHI
BRILLLEIDEN • BOSTON • KOLN 2002
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Gataloging-in-Publication Data
The Ottomans and the Balkans : a discussion of historiography / edited by Fikret Adanir & Suraiya Faroqhi.
p. cm. — (The Ottoman Empire and its heritage, ISSN 1380-6067 ; v. 25)
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 9004119027 (hard cover : alk. paper)
1. Balkan Peninsula—Relations—Turkey—Historiography. 2. Turkey--Relations—Balkan Peninsula—Historiography. I. Adanir, Fikret. II. Faroqhi, Suraiya, 1941- III. Series.
DR38.3.T9 O88 2002
949.6'02'072—dc21 2001037791
CIP
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The Ottomans and the Balkans : a discussion of historiography / ed. by Fikret Adanir & Suraiya Faroqhi. - Leiden ; Boston ; Koln : Brill, 2002
(The Ottoman Empire and its heritage ; Vol. 25) ISBN 90-04-11902-7
ISSN 1380-6076 ISBN 9 0 0 4 1 1 9 0 2 7
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Acknowledgements vii Introduction
Suraiya Faroqhi and Fikret Adamr 1
Chapter One. Bad Times and Better Self: Definitions of Identity and Strategies for Development in Late Ottoman Historiography, 1850-1900
Christoph Neumann
Chapter Two. Research Problems concerning the Transition to Tourkokratia: the Byzantinist Standpoint
Klaus-Peter Matschke
Chapter Three. The Ottoman Empire in the Historiography of the Kemalist Era: a Theory of Fatal Decline
Bii§ra Ersanh
Chapter Four. Non-Muslim Minorities in the
Historiography of Republican Turkey: the Greek Case Hercules Millas
Chapter Five. Ottoman Rule Experienced and
Remembered: Remarks on Some Local Greek Chronicles of the Tourkokratia
Johann Strauss
Chapter Six. Islamization in the Balkans as a Historiographical Problem: the Southeast-European Perspective
Antonina
Chapter Seven. The Formation of a 'Muslim' Nation in Bosnia-Hercegovina: a Historiographic Discussion
VI CONTENTS
Chapter Eight. Hungarian Studies in Ottoman History
David and Pal Fodor
Chapter Nine. Coping with the Central State, Coping with Local Power: Ottoman Regions and Notables from the Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century
Suraiya Faroqhi
List of contributors Bibliography Index
In the course of putting together this volume, we have accumulated quite a few debts. One of the most important is to Jeanne Adamr, without whose help during the editing process, this volume would still be a sheaf of unedited paper. She also has translated the arti-cle by Klaus-Peter Matschke from the original German. On the Bochum end, Christian Mady's help has been much appreciated, especially with the Hungarian material, and Kerstin Engelbrecht and Nicole Opa^chi also have contributed a great deal. As for the Munich part of the operation, Ban§ Qali§an patiently has dealt with abstruse library requests. Our thanks also go to Halil Inalcik, Gudrun Krae-mer, Klaus Kreiser and Christoph K. Neumann, who have provided many valuable suggestions with respect to content. Apart from the material aid given, all these people's friendliness and good humor have been a source of joy and inspiration.
We are grateful to our contributors as well; some of them have waited patiently for many years. We also admire the energy of those who have produced articles at very short notice. All of our fellow workers have put up with our sometimes intrusive editing suggestions, and we can never thank them enough for their spirit of cooperation.
SURAIYA FAROQHI AND FIKRET ADANIR
In the present volume, the authors hope to contribute to the ongo-ing discussion of historiography concernongo-ing the Ottoman Empire, focusing on issues in one way or another relevant to the history of southeastern Europe. Such an enterprise must be viewed in the con-text of our discipline's self-examination, which has been going on for more than twenty years, since Edward Said published his scathing critique of 'orientalism'. Admittedly, Said's book but marginally addressed itself to the work of Ottomanists; yet it did not fail to make an impact on many thoughtful representatives of our field.1
In a different vein, our questioning also has been directed at the performance of national states in general, with those established in southeastern Europe, present-day Turkey included, as the center of attention. This questioning has gained in urgency due to the con-flicts of recent years. Given the political context, present-day rethink-ing of Ottoman history will often include a re-examination of sultanic policies vis-a-vis dissident provincials, with special emphasis on those political measures evaluated negatively in the past.2 Conflicts
encour-aging such a re-evaluation of the performance of both multi-ethnic empires and national states include the Cyprus war of 1974, the Lebanon conflagration (1975-1990), repressive measures against the Muslim minority in Bulgaria culminating in the mass expulsion of 1989, serious military confrontations in eastern Anatolia, and espe-cially the horrors of the war in former Yugoslavia, of which the
1 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). For much pertinent criticism of
Ottomanists' assumptions, see Rifa'at A. Abou-El-Haj, Formation of the Modem State, The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Albany NY, 1991). For a recent evaluation of primary and secondary sources on Ottoman history see Klaus Kreiser, Der osmanische Staat 1300-1922 (Munich, 2001).
2 Engin Akarli, The Long Peace, Ottoman Lebanon 1861-1920 (Berkeley, 1993). For
a different perspective, see Ariel Salzmann, "An Ancien Regime Revisited: 'Priva-tization' and Political Economy in the Eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire," Poli-tics and Society 2 1 , 4 (1993), 393-423, and also Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats, the Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca, London, 1994).
2 SURAIYA FAROQHI AND FIKRET ADANIR
Muslim Bosnians were among the principal victims. It is difficult to avoid asking oneself how these traumas might have been pre-vented. Some researchers will also wonder whether integration into a Muslim-based but secularized supranational state might not have opened up the road to a less confrontational future.3
But apart from this background more or less specific to our dis-cipline, there also exist trends in other fields of history which encour-age historians working in very different specialties to re-examine the value of their work. To begin with, there is the public concern with memory. While memory coincides with the results of historical research in certain areas, it noticeably diverges from scholarly reconstruction in many others.4 Searching investigations into the memory of
wit-nesses have been going on for the past decades, undertaken by his-torians, journalists and above all, film makers.5 But at present this
research is if anything intensifying, as the number of people who witnessed World War II and the Nazi mass murders dwindles every year. But by concerning themselves with the memories of eye wit-nesses, historians have had to confront the challenge that those most immediately involved often do not 'recognize themselves' in the his-torical reconstructions proposed by members of the discipline. Debat-ing the links and cleavages between history and memory, historians have been obliged to rethink their own procedures. For active fields producing considerable numbers of studies every year, we possess recent book-length summaries which map the state of the field, crit-icize certain aspects of it and point to the current desiderata.6
Within the limits set by our linguistic and other capabilities, the contributors to the present volume attempt something similar. In the body of our text, we will survey the work which has been done by scholars active in the Balkan 'successor states' of the Ottoman Empire, and also in republican Turkey. But before we get to this point, it
3 In the economic realm, this questioning has been carried furthest by Michael
Palairet, who has defended the thesis that the Ottoman Empire of Mahmud II and Abdiilmecid I constituted a better framework for economic development in the Balkans than the nineteenth-century national states: Michael Palairet, The Balkan Economies c. 1800-1914, Evolution without Development (Cambridge, 1997).
4 For a monumental collection of studies concerning these issues, compare Pierre
Nora (ed.), Les lieux de la memoire, la Republique, la Nation, les France, 3 vols. (Paris, 1997).
3 For a historian's treatment compare Annette Wieviorka, L'Ere du temoin (Paris, 1998). 6 Compare Michel Balard et alii, "Byzance, 1'Orient chretien et le monde turc",
in Michel Balard (ed.), L'histoire medievale en France, bilan et perspectives (Paris, 1991), 331-62.
seems necessary to discuss the links of twentieth-century historiogra-phy with the rich historical tradition of the Ottoman Empire itself. In this introduction, we will consequently examine the manner in which certain underlying themes of the great Ottoman chronicles, such as sultanic power, the Ottoman bureaucracy and warfare, have been treated in twentieth-century Ottomanist historiography.
Certainly, the present authors would submit that twentieth-cen-tury historiography departs from its Ottoman predecessor in two major ways. On the one hand, the relationships of the Ottoman world to its neighbors have been viewed by modern historians in a new and different perspective. However, the transition from Ottoman to post-Ottoman was gradual. While Ottoman chronicles down to the early nineteenth century regarded relations with the outside world purely as a matter of campaigns and treaties, authors of the following period attempted to explain the reasons for certain major events tak-ing place outside the Ottoman frontiers. Such developments included the French Revolution or, later, even the rise of socialism.7 Thus the
foundations of a more broadly based history of the Ottoman Empire and its relations to various neighboring states were laid in the clos-ing decades of the Ottoman period, even though more scholarly researches took place only during the later, republican epoch.
In the same vein, Byzantine history entered the consciousness of educated Ottomans in the late nineteenth century, when authors such as Ahmed Midhat, following European models, stigmatized the Byzantine Empire as the abode of 'fanaticism, absurdity and immoral-ity'.8 However, even Ahmed Midhat accepted that close parallels
existed between Byzantium and the late Ottoman world, if only because both empires were embattled states under attack from all sides. In a lengthy article first published in 1931 and read by most Ottomanists of our generation, Fuat Koprulii, the founding father of Ottoman cultural history, came to the conclusion that few imme-diate links between the two socio-political systems can ever have
7 Christoph Neumann, Das indirekte Argument, Ein Pladoyer fur die Tangimat vermittels
der Historie. Die geschichtliche Bedeutung von Ahmed Cevdet Pa$as Ta'rih (Miinster, Ham-burg, 1994); idem, "Mazdak, nicht Marx: Friihe osmanische Wahrnehmungen von Sozialismus und Kommunismus", in Tiirkische IVirtschqfts- und Sozialgeschichte von 1071 bis 1920, ed. by Hans Georg Majer and Raoul Motika (Wiesbaden, 1995), 211-26.
8 Michael Ursinus, "Byzantine History in Late Ottoman Turkish Historiography",
in Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 10 (1986), 211-22; Christoph Herzog, Geschichte und Ideologie: Mehmed Murad und Celal Nuri uber die historischen Ursachen des osmanischen Medergangs (Berlin, 1996).
4 SURAIYA FAROQHI AND FIKRET ADANIR
existed. After all, Byzantium was long past its prime when the Ottoman Turks appeared on the Anatolian scene.9 However, while
students were for a long time encouraged to think that Kopriilii's article was the final word on the question, recent studies have shown that this is very far from being the case. Quite to the contrary, the Byzantine-Ottoman transition, and thus linkages between the two societies, have turned into a fruitful field of study, and the chapter by Klaus Peter Matschke in the present volume contains a com-prehensive survey of recent research in this field.
Ottoman historians made frequent references to the embattled bor-der areas, the serhad. Yet only in the twentieth century did histori-ans working in Turkey begin to study the functioning of the Empire's sixteenth-century northern, southern and eastern borders in any detail. And even then, this concern was less intensive than one might have expected.10 On the whole, border relations with the Habsburgs, and
with the Russians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were left to the attentions of non-Turkish researchers.'' In the same way, Ottoman-French, Ottoman-English and Ottoman-Dutch relations became the province of European and North American scholars, often though not exclusively from the states immediately concerned. In the Habsburg instance, mainly Austrians and Hungarians were intrigued by the complexities of border relations in peace and war.12
On the other hand, economic relations with Europe did become
9 Kopriiliizade M. Fuat, "Bizans muesseselerinin Osmanh miiesseselerine te'siri
hakkmda bazi miilahazalar", Turk Hukuk ve Iktisat Tarihi Mecmuasi 1 (1931), 165-314.
10 Halil Inalcik, "Osmanh-Rus rekabetinin men§ei ve Don-Volga kanali te§ebbusii", Belleten 12 (1948), 349-402; Bekir Kutiikoglu, Osmanh-Iran siydsi miinasebetleri, I: 1578-1590 (Istanbul, 1962); Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanh Imparatorlugunun giiney siyaseti. Habef Eyaleti (Istanbul, 1974).
11 Exceptional are two studies by Kernal Beydilli: Die polnischen Konigswahlen und Interregnen von 1572 und 1576 im Lichte osmanischer Anhivalien. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der osmanischen Machtpolitik (Munich, 1976), and Buyiik Friedrich ve Osmanhlar, XVIII. yuzyilda Osmanh-Prusya miinasebetleri (Istanbul, 1985).
12 Geza David and Pal Fodor (eds.), Hungarian-Ottoman Military and Diplomatic Rela-tions in the Age of Siileyman the Magnificent (Budapest, 1994); Markus Kohbach, Die Eroberung von Fiilek durch die Osmanen 1554. Eine historisch-quellenkritische Studie zur osma-nischen Expansion im b'stlichen Mitteleuropa (Vienna, 1994); Claudia Roemer, Osmanische Festungsbesatzungen in Ungarn zur %dt Murads III. Dargestellt an Hand von Petitionen zur Stellenvergabe (Vienna, 1995); Gabor Agoston, "Habsburgs and Ottomans, Defense, Military Change and Shifts in Power", The Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 22,1 (1998), 126-41. On Hungarians' treatment of the Ottoman-Hungarian border, in its entirety see the contribution by Geza David and Pal Fodor in the present volume.
a major field of research in Turkey from the 1970s onwards.13
Schol-arly interest focused on the Ottoman Empire's incorporation into the early modern and, later, into the fully capitalist world economy. Many of the historians concerned worked within the Wallersteinian model and asked themselves how, and at what time, the Ottoman territories became part of a dependent 'periphery'. At a later stage, the question of how Ottoman producers reacted to their 'incorpora-tion', whether they simply went bankrupt or found means of adap-tation, equally became a major issue.14
Down to the present day, Turkish historians have followed the cues given by their Ottoman predecessors and have shown a strong predilection for the study of the Ottoman center. Yet a second novel aspect of present-day Ottomanist historiography, in which it differs strongly from its Ottoman antecedents, involves the history of indi-vidual regions within the Empire. On the whole, these had received short shrift from Ottoman chroniclers, whose lives and careers were so often oriented toward the imperial center. In the present intro-duction, we will limit ourselves to a cursory glance at the relations between center and provinces, as this theme will dominate many contributions to our volume. Of course, the legitimation of regional studies among historians is inextricably linked with the nationalist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even if the more naive attempts at equating eighteenth-century tendencies toward decentralization with proto-nationalist movements now have been overcome. Just a few years ago, an important study has appeared which shows that centralization is not always equivalent to 'moder-nity'.13 In this perspective, local elites' greater consciousness of the
potentialities of 'their' respective regions can coexist with close and even intensifying ties to the Ottoman center. This observation is especially applicable to the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. For the sake of completeness, this tension between integration and regional consciousness, which is not treated at any great length by our contributors, will briefly occupy us here.
13 For an overview over the relevant work, see Huri Islamoglu-Inan (ed.), The
Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (Cambridge, Paris, 1987).
14 Donald Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution
(Cam-bridge, 1993).
6 SURAIYA FAROQHI AND FIKRET ADANIR
Ottoman history in the Ottoman period
Every 'modern-style' historian is, in one way or another, dependent on the historiographical tradition of the society which he/she sets out to study. This tradition determines what kind of information the researcher will find in the sources at his/her disposal. If chronolog-ical precision and attention to politchronolog-ical detail were no priorities for the writers of a given age, modern historians will have a lot of trou-ble determining the when, how and why even of fairly important events.16 On a deeper level, there is the problem that researchers
often will strongly identify with 'their' sources, on which, after all, they have to spend such a great deal of time. Frequently a linguistic barrier has to be overcome, made more daunting by the fact that in many cultures it was and is customary to employ languages other than the idiom of everyday communication for courtly, diplomatic or scholarly purposes. All this means a considerable investment of time and effort, and once this investment has been made, researchers often will feel that 'their' sources 'must be getting it right'. For if this were not the case, a new investment would need to be made in order to access novel sources, and a human lifetime, alas, is of limited duration.17
Adherence to routine apart, it is this emotional identification with the relevant primary sources which often induces modern historians to accept the views of sixteenth- or nineteenth-century authors with-out too much criticism. What Ottoman historians regarded as im-portant, will quite 'naturally' appear as such to the novice and even to the experienced Ottomanist. Moreover, this de facto dependence soon will be legitimized on a scholarly level as well: We all fear anachronism, that mortal sin of historians, and to accept the per-spective of the primary sources at hand seems a sure protection against this danger. An overly close adherence to the statements of chroniclers or memorialists will, however, result in a neglect of
every-16 Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, The Construction of the Ottoman State
(Berke-ley, Los Angeles, 1995), p. 116 and elsewhere.
17 As an instructive example, we might point out that the changeover from
Ara-bic to Roman characters in Turkey (1928) was received with great reserve by the foreign scholarly community. This new alphabet had been well thought out, and among other positive points, for the first time ever permitted the cursory reading of Turkish texts. Yet it took several decades before this script was accepted by many foreign Ottomanists, who, after all, had spent a long time mastering its predecessor.
body and every issue which these personages considered quantite
neg-ligeable, including, in the Ottoman instance, craftsmen, peasants and
women. Closeness to the primary sources must thus alternate with a critical contextualization of the relevant authors and the latters' major claims. But all this means that we cannot make sense of Ottomanist historiography without taking the Ottoman historic-graphical tradition into account.
In their own time, Ottomans close to the court, often active or former officials, wrote numerous histories of the Ottoman dynasty. In the sixteenth century a §ehnameci was specifically commissioned to produce an account of the current reign in verses inspired by that master of Iranian epic poetry, Firdawsi.18 This enterprise was
not pursued for long, and in the seventeenth century there were no official historiographers. When the sultans once again began to spon-sor the production of chronicles at some point in the eighteenth century, the new accounts were written in more or less sober prose, often by highly qualified authors, such as the Aleppine Mustafa Naima or Mehmed Ra§id.19 Until the end of the Empire, the sultanate
repeatedly commissioned official histories until the end of the empire.20
But the authors of these often multi-volume works never monopolized the field; there were always writers who produced histories without official sponsorship, and in the nineteenth century, many such accounts were to be printed. Most authors of officially sponsored chronicles were expected to cover long spans of time which they themselves had not witnessed; this meant that they needed to rely on the works of their predecessors. In certain cases, especially if the authors were present or former high-level bureaucrats, they also might gain access to a selection of official documents.
Moreover, the writing of historical accounts was by no means a lost art in the Ottoman provinces. Even in the sixteenth century, Istanbul intellectuals were impressed by the history, and history-writing, of Mamluk Egypt; but the events of the subsequent period were also recorded in chronicles. Down to the seventeenth century, Ottomans writing on Egypt normally gathered their information from local, Egyptian sources, while from that time onwards, they
18 Christine Woodhead, Ta'hki-zade's §ehname-i hiimayun. A History of the Ottoman
Campaign into Hungary 1593~94 (Berlin, 1983).
19 Lewis Thomas, A Study of Naima, ed. by Norman Itzkowitz (New York, 1972).
20 See Neumann, Das indirekte Argument, for the manner in which a distinguished
8 SURAIYA FAROQHI AND FIKRET ADANIR
increasingly undertook researches of their own.21 In the large cities
of Syria, the eighteenth century was a time in which both Muslims and Christians wrote about local events. Sometimes they limited themselves to what happened in their respective home cities, but some chroniclers took a wider view and, for instance, included infor-mation on the pilgrimage routes to Mecca and the deserts they traversed.22 In Mosul, local ulema and even craftsmen wrote about
life in their city. Particularly fascinating is the poem in which a mas-ter textile artisan of the eighteenth century complained about hav-ing sunk so low that he was obliged to deal with beyond-the-pale creatures such as women.23 At the end of the eighteenth century, a
modest inhabitant of Sarajevo by the name of Mustafa Bas,eskiya produced a town chronicle as well, written in Ottoman with numer-ous borrowings from Bosnian.24 Greek provincial chronicles were
composed ever since the seventeenth century; some of them will be treated in the present volume by Johann Strauss.
Sometimes, but by no means always, Ottoman dynastic history was placed into a world historical context, which might include pre-Islamic rulers as well as early pre-Islamic history. But the main focus of interest were the deeds of the Ottoman sultans themselves. Accord-ingly, the reign of an individual ruler was the normal unit of time to be treated in a single section. Warfare and public construction, which functioned as major sources of imperial legitimacy, were accorded special attention. But Ottoman officialdom also used these chronicles as venues to document its own history; thus appointments to the major offices often were treated in separate chapters. More-over, after the events of a given reign had been covered, many
21 Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Egypt's Adjustment to Ottoman Rule, Institutions, Waqf and Architecture in Cairo (16th and 17th Centuries) (Leiden, 1994), pp. 8-13.
22 Bruce Masters, "The View from the Province: Syrian Chronicles of the
Eight-eenth Century," Journal of the American Oriental Society 114, 3 (1994), 353-362.
23 Dina R. Khoury, State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire, Mosul, 1540-1834
(Cambridge, 1997), p. 138.
24 On chronicles written by Bosnians compare the introduction to Salih Sidki
Hadzihuseinovic Muvekkit, Tarih-i Bosna, trans, and commented by Abdulah Poli-mac et alii (Sarajevo, 1998), pp. XVII-XXXIII. Salih Sidki (1825-1888) has pro-duced a book midway between a traditional chronicle and a modern study. While he writes in "an epic style" (p. XXX) and is not always concerned about histori-cal accuracy, he has used an impressive array of sources in both Serbian and Ottoman. He thus may be compared to certain Greek authors of the Ottoman period, to whom Johann Strauss will refer in his section of our book. We are grate-ful to Markus Koller, who has supplied us with this reference.
chronicles included selected biographies of the important figures who had died during the period under consideration. This was another opportunity to supplement the ruler's history by that of the men who had served him. Such a manner of conceiving history made sense from a socio-political viewpoint. After all, from the 1640s on-wards, it was increasingly obvious that grand viziers, chief juris-consults, dowager sultanas, chief eunuchs and Janissary commanders had a major role to play in Ottoman politics. In the worst case, the Ottoman state could now survive a sultan's long minority, the lat-ter's lack of interest in state business, or even, at least for a while, a ruler who was a madman.20
A challenge to twentieth-century historians
All this means that when nineteenth and twentieth-century scholars began to study the history of the Ottoman Empire, they could base themselves on an ongoing historical tradition. This applies both to subjects and former subjects of the sultan and to those who, like the Austrian scholar-diplomat Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, wrote about Ottoman history as outsiders.26 At least where Istanbul-centered
histories were concerned, the Ottoman mode of historiography formed part of an imperial tradition; one cannot help remembering that the Chinese court also sponsored official histories of every dynasty. As to the provincial chronicles, their prestige was minimal. Johann Strauss' article shows how long these writings were ignored, even in the places where they had originated and whose history they glorified. Ottoman imperial history emphasized 'kings and battles' in a fash-ion quite familiar to European historians working in the aftermath of World War I, and in many instances even much later. Wars, with diplomatic relations a poor second, were considered the stuff of his-tory, both by Ottoman chroniclers and by European historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This remarkable con-gruence probably was due in part to the monarch-centered style of thinking which characterized the historical professions in the two cul-tures concerned. Monarchs, along with their ministers and generals, were considered as almost the only legitimate historical 'players'. On
-' Abou-El-Haj, Formation of the Modern State, p. 38.
10 SURAIYA FAROQHI AND FIKRET ADANIR
this issue, comparable styles of thinking prevailed, both in the Ottoman Empire and in nineteenth and twentieth-century central Europe, where interest in things Ottoman was at that time especially strong.27
Sultanic power and magnificence
Given this congruence, it is surprising that only during the last twenty years or so have historians begun to investigate the roots of sultanic power and legitimacy. Up to that time, this legitimacy was taken for granted, at least where the pre-Hamidian period and the Empire's Muslim subjects were concerned. Or conversely, as apparent from Bu§ra Ersanli's study, in early republican Turkey the Ottoman rul-ing group was viewed as corrupt and therefore per se illegitimate.28
However, in reality sultanic legitimacy was not as simple a matter as it might appear at first glance.29 In the 'classical period' of the
sixteenth century, Ottoman sultans do seem to have suffered from a 'legitimacy deficit', in the sense that they did not belong to the Quraysh clan from which legitimate caliphs were expected to issue. Moreover, unlike other Islamic dynasties in this position, the Ottoman sultans never made any claims to Quraysh descent either. Nor could these rulers claim Genghis Khan as their ancestor, the dominant form of legitimation in the Turco-Mongol context of Central Asia. Rather, Ottoman sultans normally asserted that their rule was justi-fied by the concrete services they rendered to the Islamic commu-nity.30 Victories over the infidels played a major role in this form of
legitimation, and even in the later seventeenth century, a sultan who
27 Admittedly, by no means all the scholars who after 1945 were to promote a
different type of history, strongly socio-economic in orientation, were notable for their democratic convictions. Yet to an observer of twentieth-century events, it became increasingly difficult to ignore the role of 'ordinary' people in contempo-rary history, however much they might have been manipulated by their 'betters'. This real-life situation must have appreciably contributed toward discrediting the 'king and battle' approach.
28 However, this did not mean that Ottomanist historians became interested in
the practices which we, and sometimes contemporaries as well, perceived as 'cor-rupt'. One of the few analyses of this kind which has appeared in print is due to Cornell H. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire, The Historian Mustafa 'All (1541-1600) (Princeton, 1986), 85-86, 120-121 and passim. See also Ahmet Mumcu, Osmanh Devletinde riisvet (Ozellikle adli riisvet) (Ankara, 1969).
29 Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, 270 ff. 30 Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, 288-89.
suffered defeat against the Habsburgs was liable to lose his throne.31
But within the Empire's confines, the 'just rule' of the sultan also was a major legitimizing factor. This is apparent from the numer-ous sultanic commands issued as responses to petitions for the repa-ration of abuses, which arrived in the capital every year. But Ottoman rulers also demonstrated their right to govern by the care they took to promote the interests of the Empire's subjects'. These activities included the protection of merchants, travelers and especially pil-grims to Mecca. But ensuring the grain supply of the Holy Cities in the Hejaz, or establishing impressive pious foundations in highly visible sites also could augment sultanic legitimacy.
Yet this practical aspect to Ottoman legitimation did not exclude the use of symbols, far from it. Giilru Necipoglu has studied the commissioning of a helmet rather reminiscent of the papal tiara, which the Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha undertook in the 1520s, when the entourage of the young Sultan Suleyman evidently hoped for a speedy conquest of central Europe and perhaps also Italy.32 When
these conquests did not materialize, the tiara was melted down. But in the 1550s, the great mosque complex of the Suleymaniye was dec-orated with inscriptions celebrating the sultan as the victor over Shi'i heretics, a motif later taken up by Sultan Ahmed I in his 'Blue Mosque' as well.33 That Ottoman rulers arranged for major public festivals
in the capital and also in the larger provincial towns, must have also enhanced their image, at least among a section of their subjects.
Recent research moreover has shown that the funeral ceremonies for a deceased sultan and the inthronization of his successor also involved ceremonies intended to further the legitimacy of the dynasty. This remains true even though funerary ceremonies, especially after the sixteenth century, tended to emphasize the religious truth that the dead ruler shared the fate of all deceased Muslims. By this time, Sunni piety had become a major legitimizing feature in and of itself. Moreover, while at first glance the legitimizing value of the central
31 Rifa'at Abou-El-Haj, "Ottoman Methods of Negotiation: The Karlowitz Case", Der Islam 51, 1 (1974), 131-37.
32 Giilru Necipoglu, "Suleyman the Magnificent and the Representation of Power
in the Context of Ottoman-Habsburg-Papal Rivalry," The Art Bulletin 7 1 , 3 (1989) 401-27.
33 Gulru Necipoglu-Kafadar, "The Suleymaniye Complex in Istanbul: an
Inter-pretation," Muqarnas 3 (1986), 92—117; [Ca'fer Efendi], Risdle-i mi'mariyye, an Early-seventeenth-century Ottoman treatise on architecture, trans. Howard Crane (Leiden, 1987).
12 SURAIYA FAROQHI AND FIKRET ADANIR
enthronement ceremony seems to have been limited, in reality the advent of a new sultan had a wider impact. For in addition to the declaration of loyalty on the part of viziers and high officials, which was concealed from public view by the walls of the Topkapi palace, a novel rite was developed in the seventeenth century. This involved the girding of 'the sword of Osman' in the extra muros sanctuary of Eyiip. In the course of this pilgrimage-owz-enthronement rite, the ruler was made visible to the people of Istanbul and symbolically took possession of his capital city.34
Many of the events discussed in these modern studies of the sul-tan's power and legitimacy were first recorded by chroniclers active in Istanbul, and thus the Ottoman elite must have considered them important. Therefore it makes sense to claim that modern histori-ans concerned with sultanic power and legitimacy link up with the works of their Ottoman predecessors. However, modern historians do study the relevant phenomena in the broader context provided by comparative history and political anthropology.
Bureaucrats as historical subjects
The bureaucracy as a historical subject, which figured so promi-nently in the Ottoman chronicles, also should have made sense to the Ottomanist historian of the early twentieth century. After all, Max Weber recently had suggested that bureaucratic rule was char-acteristic of 'mature' states. However, before the 1940s, Weber did not as yet excite much interest among Ottoman and Turkish histo-rians.35 On the other hand, European historians dealing with the
Ottoman Empire were busy assembling their primary sources, a diffi-cult task when, due to World War I and then to post-war turmoil, libraries were in disarray and travel budgets non-existent. Broader
34 Nicolas Vatin, "Aux origines du pelerinage a Eyiip des sultans ottomans" Tunica
27 (1995), 91-100.
35 For a convenient summary of Weber's ideas on the issue in English, see Max
Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans, by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, ed. with an Introduction by Talcott Parsons (New York, London, 1964), pp. 341-68. The first Turkish historian to use Weberian categories, in an attempt to explain the peculiarities of 'artisan mentality' during the late Ottoman period, was Sabri Ulgener (1911-1983). More recent contributions include the two books by Carter Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire. The Sublime Porte 1789~ 1922 (Princeton, 1980) and Ottoman Civil Officialdom, a Social History (Princeton, 1989).
perspectives on the role of the Ottoman bureaucracy in a world his-torical perspective were thus completely missing. Only after 1945, and perhaps with subterranean links to the neo-Weberian current among contemporary American social scientists, did the Ottoman bureaucracy 'arrive' as a major scholarly topic.
But a considerable challenge to historians concerned with Ottoman state structures also came from a set of lengthy descriptions of the Ottoman military and central administration. These had been pub-lished by Ismail Hakki Uzuncars,ih during and immediately after World War II, with a latecomer volume on the specialists in Islamic law and religion (ilmiye) appearing in 1965.36 These books were
some-thing of a novelty in the Turkish context, insofar as Ottoman his-toriography had but rarely produced such tableaux of administrative structure. However, the format was well known to European histo-rians of the Ottoman Empire, as attempts to describe Ottoman 'insti-tutions' had been made ever since the sixteenth century, with Joseph von Hammer publishing an especially elaborate version in 1815.37
Yet before Uzuncar§ili, such surveys had been based on the infor-mation contained in the few Ottoman source texts available. Or for the most part, they relayed material gathered by European travel-ers to the Ottoman Empire, whose sources of information often left a great deal to be desired.38 At the very best, occasional documents
might have been used by those authors who could gain access to them, such as Mouradjea d'Ohsson in the late eighteenth century and Hammer in the early nineteenth.39
Uzungar§ih, by contrast, set out to document his descriptions from sources much closer to the structures under consideration, namely Ottoman chronicles and, to a large extent, original archival documents. From a present-day perspective, Uzuncar§ili's great weakness is his
36 Ismail Hakki Uzuncars,ih, Osmanh Devleti te§kilatma medhal (Istanbul, 1941); idem,
Osmanh Devleti te^kilatindan kapukulu ocaklan, 2 vols. (Ankara, 1943-44); idem, Osmanh Devletinin saray te§kilati (Ankara, 1945); idem, Osmanh Devletinin merkez ve bahriye te§kildti (Ankara, 1948); idem, Osmanh Devletinin ilmiye te^kilati (Ankara, 1965).
3/ Joseph von Hammer- [Purgstall], Des Osmanischen Reiches Staatsverfassung und Staatsver-waltung, dargestellt aus den Quellen seiner Grundgesetze (Hildesheim, reprint 1963).
38 A fine example of such misinformation concerning the manner in which a
jeyhiilislam might be executed has been analyzed by Hans Georg Majer, "Der Tod im Morser: eine Strafe fur osmanische Schejchulislame?" in Von der Pruth-Ebene bis zum Gipfel des Ida. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Emanuel Turczynski, ed. by Gerhard Grimm (Munich, 1989), 141-52.
39 Mouradjea d'Ohsson, Tableau general de'l empire Ottoman, 2nd ed., 7 vols. (Paris,
14 SURAIYA FAROQHI AND FIKRET ADANIR
inability, or refusal, to think of the different bureaucracies within the Ottoman administration as subject to change over time. Even though he chronicled major reorganizations, particularly those occurring in the eighteenth century, his institutions appear to exist in a timeless realm. One might say that for Uzuncar§ili there was a static 'clas-sical Ottoman period', which began in the middle of the fifteenth century and ended about four hundred years later. During this period, whatever changes might have happened were no more than the super-ficial ripples which a deep lake may show on a fine summer's day. Nor does Uzungar§ili transmit a real sense of place. This omis-sion is all the more remarkable as the author tends to limit himself to bureaucracies operating in Istanbul. Yet the constantly changing mammoth capital with its diverse inhabitants rarely enters the pic-ture. Throughout his volumes, the author never asks himself how the Ottoman administration reacted to changes within the subject population. Thus the possibility that administrative reorganizations might have social or economic backgrounds does not enter the pic-ture at all. This gives the present-day reader a curious feeling of abstractness, of living in a never-never land. But these are criticisms made from a perspective developed during the 1970s and later, when problems of this type began to enter the field of Ottomanist historical vision. For the 1940s, Uzungar§ili's volumes constituted a tremendous achievement, and we may even describe scholarly interest in the Ottoman bureaucracy as developing 'when Uzuncar§ili met Weber'.
Ottoman warfare
Everybody knows that in 'king-and-battle' history, the battles are writ large, and Ottoman history-writing down to the nineteenth century is no exception to this rule. Quite to the contrary, as we have seen, victory in war against the infidels constituted a major legitimizing device. From the sixteenth century onwards, moreover, European au-thors have tended to regard the Ottoman Empire as a near-perfect military society.
However, in the historiography of the last seventy years, Ottoman warfare has not constituted a favorite field of study. On the Turk-ish side, this may have something to do with the fact that the suc-cessive governments of the Republic of Turkey certainly regarded, and continue to regard, the war against Greece and its British and other allies as the founding event of the new state. But once the
Peace of Lausanne had been concluded in 1923, the Republic not only proclaimed its desire for international peace, but also managed to steer clear of external wars to a remarkable degree.40 This may
well explain why, even though sefer ve zqfer ('campaigns and victo-ries', i.e. of the Ottoman sultans) continue to form part of political rhetoric, Turkish historians are not greatly interested in Ottoman warfare.41 Moreover, many participants in the Ottomanist field, of
whatever nationality, may have developed a visceral reaction against warfare of any kind. With the trauma of war and Nazism but a short span of years away, this is not a topic which can be approached with detachment. On the other hand, it also makes little sense to many non-Turkish historians to project their own concerns about the horrors of war upon a fairly remote past and a foreign civiliza-tion. Avoidance of the topic thus seems a logical conclusion.
Be that as it may, this outlook is changing. In the beginning there was a seminal article by the economic historian Mehmed Gene, con-cerning the manner in which Ottoman wars were financed in the eighteenth century.42 Gene assumes that the military setbacks,
espe-cially after 1750, were caused largely by a failure to adequately sup-ply the Ottoman armies with weapons, uniforms and tents. This weakness of the Ottoman craft economy in turn was caused by the fact that payments for war materiel, if they occurred at all, were way below market value. Moreover, the more efficient producers were asked for larger deliveries than their less successful competi-tors. Collection from a few major suppliers was of course easier from a bureaucrat's point of view. But we also must keep in mind that the ethic of artisan-guildsmen frowned upon anybody who earned more than his fellows, and Ottoman officials may well have endorsed this judgment. In consequence, a war of any length resulted in the near-collapse of capital-starved craft producers, and the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire became a victim of its inade-quate system of war financing.
4(1 The only exceptions constitute the declaration of war against the Axis powers
late in 1946, the sending of a contingent to fight in the Korean war, the landing in Cyprus (1974) and a rather limited involvement in the recent Gulf War.
41 It is of interest that among the emerging group of specialists in the field of
Ottoman warfare, we find English, American and Hungarian scholars, but very few Turkish historians.
42 Mehmet Gene, "XVIII. Yiizyilda Osmanh Ekonomisi ve Sava§," Tapit. Toplum-sal Arajtirmalar Dergisi, 49/4, pp. 51-61; 50/5 (1984), pp. 86-93; French version: "L'Economie ottomane et la guerre au XVIIP siecle," Tunica 27 (1995), 177-96.
16 SURAIYA FAROQHI AND FIKRET ADANIR
Gene approached the issue from the viewpoint of the economic historian; his younger colleague Rhoads Murphey was to adopt the social historian's approach.43 Murphey sets out to show that the old
story, often casually repeated in the secondary literature, of Ottoman soldiers motivated to heroic deeds by religious zeal alone, is no more than a fable. Similarly to other soldiers, Ottoman military men expected tangible rewards in terms of booty, but also in the shape of an albeit rough justice, which awarded merit its due. Here the sultan's prestige, which stood high throughout most crises of Ottoman history and which was based on his reputation for justice, worked as a major stabilizing factor. In Murphey's perspective, Ottoman society until about 1700 was organized in a fashion which enabled it to meet the soldiers' expectations without major stress or strain.
Murphey's research had first focused on Murad IV and his east-ern campaigns. But when writing his monograph, he could also base himself on the work of Caroline Finkel, who previously had studied the logistics of Ottoman campaigns during the Long War in Hun-gary. Finkel also had pointed out that around 1600, Ottoman mil-itary organization was more efficient than had been assumed in earlier years. For she was able to show that most supplies, as well as a considerable number of soldiers, did not come from the Ottoman core lands at all, but from Bosnia, which thus justified its reputa-tion as a serhad, or land of border warfare.44 Gabor Agoston
pur-sued this line of work, asking himself how the Ottomans responded to the major features of what in the European context is known as the 'military revolution' of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This spate of innovations included the massive use of firepower and small arms.45 In Agoston's view, it was not an attachment to
out-moded armament technology, or even a lack of essential supplies such as lead and gunpowder, which caused the defeats of Ottoman armies in the later seventeenth century. Rather, it was a problem of organization, of getting large quantities of supplies to remote fronts, and, in addition, there also was the difficulty of achieving high and relatively uniform technical quality in firearms.
43 Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare 1500-1700 (London, 1999).
44 Caroline Finkel, The Administration of Warfare: the Ottoman Military Campaigns in Hungary, 1593-1606, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1988).
Virginia Aksan, who has focused on the Ottoman-Russian war of 1768 1774 with its catastrophic outcome for the Ottomans, emphasizes problems of manpower rather than equipment. In Aksan's perspective, Sultans Selim III and Mahmud II, when they attempted to reform the army, not merely were following European models. They also continued the Ottoman tradition, well-established ever since the sev-enteenth century, of recruiting the 'landless and lawless' into the armed forces. According to Aksan, there were thus Ottoman precedents for the military reforms of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which finally instituted non-janissary military corps. She thus shifts the blame for Selim Ill's failure against the janissaries away from the 'foreignness' of the military innovations he had attempted to introduce, a feature which had been emphasized by a previous generation of historians. In Aksan's view, the defeat was largely due to the lack of political skill and energy on the Sultan's part, who did not use the forces at his disposal when the janissaries rebelled. Or in the case of Mahmud II, whose trained and well-supplied armies suffered a major defeat against Ibrahim Pasha, the son of Mehmed Ali Pasha, the governor of Egypt, Aksan concludes that it was probably a simple matter of Ibrahim Pasha's superior generalship. Thus the element of 'good fortune', long since known as a major ingredient of success in war, finds itself rehabilitated.46 But on the
whole, modern treatments of Ottoman warfare have concentrated exactly on those aspects which quite a few Ottoman chroniclers tended to pass over in silence, concentrating instead on those aspects of warfare in which political and social history intersect: behind-the-fronts organization, manpower, weaponry and food supplies. Major motifs suggested to historians by the Ottoman historiographical tra-dition, such as sultanic legitimacy, bureaucratic structures and war-fare, thus are being replayed in a new key.
Toward old-new horizons: Ottomans and Byzantines
Our next step must be to highlight certain themes in which present-day Ottomanist historians depart from Naima's or Ra§id's tradition,
40 Virginia Aksan, "Ottoman Military Recruitment Strategies in the Late
18 SURAIYA FAROQHI AND FIKRET ADANIR
namely the treatment of Ottoman relations with the outside world, the history of individual regions and, last but not least, the role of non-Muslim nationalism and Great Power intervention in the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Among the numerous states which form this 'outside world', the Byzantine Empire occupies a place of choice. Not so much because of its real power; after the 'Latin' conquest of 1204, Byzantium became a minor state, precariously holding on to a few fortress towns in western Anatolia. Moreover, these Anatolian possessions were rapidly lost after Michael Palaiologos had regained the old capital in 1261. What remained of the once mighty Byzan-tine Empire were a few minuscule territories on the tip of south-eastern Europe. However, the ideological status of Constantinople/ Istanbul was quite out of proportion with the real power of the Byzantine emperors. This discrepancy is well known to historians of western Europe, and failed crusades and futile church councils aim-ing at the incorporation of the Orthodox into the Catholic Church have spawned an extensive historiography.
On the Ottomanist side, the first historian to demonstrate the importance of Istanbul's conquest and resettlement in the political agenda of Mehmed the Conqueror and his successors was Halil Inalcik. After a series of fundamental studies of the political devices by which the early Ottoman sultans transformed conquered territo-ries into permanent provinces, Inalcik tackled the complicated situ-ation with which the Ottoman government was confronted in the former Byzantine capital.47 Inalcik has stressed the role of the
Aya-sofya as the city's religious and high-cultural center before the con-struction of the Fatih complex, but he also has focused on the new commercial buildings, above all the covered market (bedestan), which helped promote trade and thus contributed to the revival of the all but deserted city. Many years later, Inalcik has rounded off his series
47 Halil Inalcik, "Ottoman Methods of Conquest", Studia Islamica 2 (1954), 103-129;
idem, Him 835 Tarihli Suret-i Defter-i Sancak-i Arvanid (Ankara, 1954); idem, "The Pol-icy of Mehmed II toward the Greek Population of Istanbul", Dumbarton Oaks Papers 23-24 (1969-70), 229-249. Further studies of the political and artistic implications of the reconstruction of Istanbul as the Ottoman capital include Stephane Yerasi-mos, Lafondation de Constantinople et de Saints-Sophie dans les traditions turques (Paris, 1990), Giilru Necipoglu, Architecture, Ceremonial and Power. The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge MA, 1991) Theocharis Stavrides, The Sultan of Vezirs. The Life and Times of the Ottoman Grand Vezir Mahmud Pasha Angelovic (1453-1474) (Lei-den, Boston, Cologne, 2001) and the forthcoming study by Cigdem Kafescioglu.
of articles on early Ottoman Istanbul by a study of Galata, in the fifteenth century still largely an Italian-speaking town.48
Through these works, it has become clear that the revival of the former Byzantine capital was made possible by extensive commer-cial activity. As the Black Sea increasingly was transformed into an Ottoman lake, Muslim merchants took over from Venetians and Genoese, and numerous products of the northern steppe lands became available to the consumers of the Ottoman capital. It is largely through Inalcik's works that we have understood that the Ottoman ruling group of the fifteenth century was in no way inimical, or even just indifferent, to long-distance trade. Quite to the contrary, the ten-dency to leave foreign trade to non-Muslims, so characteristic of nine-teenth-century Ottoman society, evolved rather late. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire emerged as a state closely concerned with the control of long-distance trade routes, and not a few of its Muslim subjects made fortunes by traveling them.49
Viewed from a different angle, recent interest in the Byzantino-Ottoman transition certainly represents an attempt by concerned his-torians both Turkish and Greek to tone down combative nationalist rhetoric and establish a scholarly dialogue.50 This interest also
doc-uments the growing maturity of the two historical fields. On both sides, certain participants now have enough self-confidence to con-front the 'other'. After all, it is sometimes possible to make up for the deficiencies of the late Byzantine or early Ottoman source bases respectively by calling on those materials now made available by the efforts of the Ottomanist or Byzantinist 'neighbors'. As Klaus Peter Matschke's article demonstrates, the study of numerous historical questions stands to gain from this kind of scholarly cooperation.
We will evoke but one example taken from the religious sphere: Ottomanist historians have to confront the difficult problems linked
48 Halil Inalcik, "The Hub of the City: The Bedestan of Istanbul", International
Journal of Turkish Studies I / I (1979-80), 1-17; idem, "Ottoman Galata, 1453-1553", in Premiere rencontre Internationale sur {'empire Ottoman et la Turquie modeme, ed. by Edhem Eldem (Istanbul, 1991), 17-116.
49 Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert (eds.), An Economic and Social History of the
Ottoman Empire 1300-1914 (Cambridge, 1994).
50 The Byzantinist congress recently convened in Istanbul, at the University of
the Bosphorus (1999), should be taken as an indication of these concerns. The Turk-ish organizers not only expressed their satisfaction at the numerous participants from within Turkey itself, but also at the fact that after several politically motivated false starts, such a congress finally had been held in the former Byzantine and Ottoman capital.
20 SURAIYA FAROQHI AND FIKRET ADANIR
to the heterodoxies which so often flourish in border regions, the fifteenth-century Ottoman serhad not excluded. In this context, the titles of two books by Michel Balivet, both a Byzantinist and an Ottomanist by training, in themselves represent a program: "(une) imbrication greco-turque" and "Islam mystique et revolution armee dans les Balkans ottomans".51 One of these books deals with the
many instances of peaceful cohabitation on the part of Byzantine Greeks and Ottoman Turks. By contrast, the other is concerned with a specific case of armed rebellion, namely the uprisings of Bedred-din Simavi, Torlak Kemal and Borkliice Mustafa. Basing themselves on the traditions of Islamic mysticism, these early fifteenth-century rebels seem to have aimed at a more egalitarian polity than that which Sultan Mehmed I was busily restoring at the time. Since our information on dissident milieus is very limited indeed, it is neces-sary to bring together whatever can be collected from both Ottoman and Byzantine sources.
On a more mundane level, an international community of schol-ars has concerned itself with the potential of the Ottoman tax reg-isters for late Byzantine local history. This proceeding was based upon the recognition that Ottoman administrators were not partic-ularly anxious to change taxation practices in newly conquered ter-ritories. Provided that there had been a direct transition from Byzantine to Ottoman rule, early sultanic tax registers, produced within a few years after the Ottoman conquest, were likely to contain numerous traces of late Byzantine revenue arrangements. Models for such tran-sition studies had been developed earlier, namely by Nicoara and Irene Beldiceanu in dealing with the little-documented Muslim prin-cipality of Karaman finally conquered by Sultan Mehmed II.52 In
recent decades, Macedonia, Bithynia, certain Aegean islands and Trabzon have emerged as the favorite testing grounds for the study of the Byzantine countryside, as mirrored, apart from Greek or Ital-ian sources, in Ottoman revenue records.53
D l Michel Balivet, Romanic byzantine et pays de Rum tun, histoire d'un espace d'imbrica-tion greco-turque (Istanbul, 1994) and Islam mystique et revolud'imbrica-tion armee dans les Balkans ottomans, Vie du Cheikh Bedreddin le "Hattaj des Turcs" (1358/59-1416) (Istanbul, 1995). 32 Nicoara Beldiceanu and Irene Beldiceanu-Steinherr, "Recherche sur la province
de Qaraman au XVI siecle," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 11 (1968), 1-129.
33 Anthony Bryer and Heath Lowry (eds.), Continuity and Change in Late Byzantine and Early Ottoman Society, (Birmingham, Washington, 1986) contains a good bibliog-raphy of these studies.
Incorporation into the European world economy
At the very beginning of Ottoman history stood the conflict with Byzantium. Let us now move six hundred years ahead in time. Towards the end of the Ottoman Empire's existence, this state was weakened not only by nationalist movements among its subjects and the ambitions of the European Great Powers. At least equally seri-ous was its economic dependence, mainly on Britain, but also on other states of an industrializing Europe. This dependence was a fact of everyday life, which members of the nineteenth-century Ottoman elites, but also peasants prosecuted for tobacco-smuggling by officials in the service of the Dette Publique Ottomane, experienced as a galling humiliation.34
Yet an intellectual framework permitting scholarly discussion of this dependence emerged relatively late, namely in the 1970s. This is the concept known as 'world systems theory', elaborated by Immanuel Wallerstein and his collaborators, including quite a few Turkish scholars. From the Ottomanist's viewpoint, Wallerstein's approach has contributed substantially towards making Ottoman his-tory a part of world hishis-tory in its own right, and not merely an 'exotic' field studied by nationalist Turks and a few oddballs. More-over Wallerstein's approach has a good deal in common with that proposed by Fernand Braudel, whose work has for a long time been known and esteemed among Ottomanists. In his three-volume work on capitalism and material life, Braudel also has constructed a model of international economic relations during the early modern period, in which the Ottoman Empire, regarded as an independent 'world economy', has been accorded considerable importance.55
To put it very briefly, 'world systems theory' is based upon the following assumptions: Down to the sixteenth century, a European economic system developed largely in the territories to the west of an imaginary line linking Stockholm to Venice. But from the early 1500s, this system expanded to become the core area of an emerg-ing 'world economy'.56 Fundamental to 'world systems theory' is the
34 As the representation of the Ottoman Empire's creditors, the Dette Publique
Ottomane had been assigned some of the best-yielding taxes paid by the sultans' subjects.
00 Fernand Braudel, Civilisation materielk, economic et capitalisme, XVe~XVIIIe siecle, 3
vols. (Paris, 1979), vol. 3, pp. 11-70.
36 On world economies prior to the European version compare Janet Abu-Lughod,
22 SURAIYA FAROQHI AND FIKRET ADANIR
contrast between such a core region, in which mercantile and later industrial capitalism predominates, and economically subservient 'peripheries'. Territories forming part of the periphery may be formal colonies or retain a measure of political independence. But in any case, they produce foodstuffs and raw materials, while providing a captive market for the products which the 'core country' dominant in the relevant peripheral region wishes to export. As a transitional area between core and periphery, the system also contains semi-peripheries, which may come about when strong states close to the core region effectively resist marginalization. Thus, for example, Spain and Portugal, whose elites had opened up large parts of Asia, Africa and America to European expansion, were unable to maintain themselves as 'core countries'. Yet their monopolistic hold over large overseas territories ensured that these two countries could not be pushed back into the periphery. Of course, relations between core, semi-periphery and periphery are never static. In the early modern period, the principal dynamic factor was the expanding economic power of the European 'core countries', which managed to 'incor-porate' ever more previously independent territories into the area under their control.37
Given the size and importance of the Ottoman world empire, a major political and military competitor of European states from the fifteenth to the very end of the seventeenth century, its fate was of crucial importance to scholars wishing to gauge the usefulness of the 'world systems' model. To phrase it differently, these researchers needed to determine at what time the Ottoman territories had been incorporated, as a periphery, into the capitalist world economy. From an Ottomanist's viewpoint, a study of the Ottoman economy in the framework of 'world systems theory' involved deciding when the Ottoman Empire ceased to function as an independent economic world and whether there were regional differences in the process of 'incorporation'.58 Here there was a choice between two radically
dif-ferent options. If one followed the work of Barkan, Braude or Qizakca during his early years, the conclusion was that peripheralization
57 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modem World-System, 3 vols. (New York, 1974, 1980,
1989).
38 Immanuel Wallerstein, Hale Decdeli and Res.at Kasaba, "The Incorporation
of the Ottoman Empire into the World Economy," in The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy, ed. by Huri Islamoglu-Inan (Cambridge and Paris, 1987), 88-100.
began at the end of the sixteenth century.39 As an alternative one
might accept Braudel's view, shared by many of today's Ottoman-ists, namely that European economic domination of the Ottoman Empire was not established until the later eighteenth or even the early nineteenth century.60 Qizak£a was to adopt this position in a
later article, while Wallerstein, Decdeli and Kasaba refused to take sides in this dispute.61 They stressed that 'incorporation' was a
com-plex process, different from one region to the next, and that avail-able research did not yet allow them to give a hard-and-fast set of dates for Ottoman incorporation into the 'world system'.
A very sophisticated discussion of Ottoman history in the Waller-steinian mode has been presented by Huri Islamoglu.62 She has taken
up the challenge inherent in the 'localist' approach adopted by many historians of the 1980s and 1990s. These scholars have pointed out that the 'world systems' approach negated the importance of the pre-vious history of the 'peripheralized' regions. No matter what kind of social and political relations existed in a given polity, so this objec-tion runs, what determines history once the region in quesobjec-tion has been 'incorporated' is merely the dynamic of the core area. Given this set of assumptions, for the social scientist wishing to understand the contemporary situation there is no need to go back beyond 1750, or at most 1590. The social scientist's 'cutoff date' will cor-respond to the year or years which specialists on the area under study consider the time of the region's 'incorporation'. Islamoglu points out that this objection should be taken very seriously. It does not imply a reversion to the old historicist claim that every major state has an 'essence' of its own, which world historical develop-ments may destroy but cannot really modify. To take account of the
59 Omer Liitfi Barkan, "The Price Revolution of the Sixteenth Century: A
Turn-ing Point in the Economic History of the Near East," International Journal of Middle East Studies 6 (1975), 3-28; Benjamin Braude, "International Competition and Domes-tic Cloth in the Ottoman Empire, 1500-1650, A Study in Undevelopment," Review, 2, 3 (1979), 437-54; Murat Qizakca, "Price History and the Bursa Silk Industry: a Study in Ottoman Industrial Decline, 1550-1650," The Journal of Economic History 40 (1980), 533-50.
60 Braudel, Civilisation materielle, vol. 3, 406-11.
61 Murat Cizakca, "Incorporation of the Middle East into the European World-Economy," Review 8, 3 (1985), 353-78.
62 Huri Islamoglu-Inan, "Oriental Despotism in World System Perspective," in The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy, ed. by Huri Islamoglu-Inan (Cambridge, Paris, 1987), pp. 1-26.
24 SURAIYA FAROQHI AND FIKRET ADANIR
difficulty, she suggests a double-pronged approach: on the one hand, it is legitimate to study the complex political and economic history of the nineteenth century, when a few European 'core countries' made large areas of the world into their periphery. But this approach needs to be integrated with a close study of local dynamics, and it is necessary to understand how these forces furthered or hindered the relevant regions' integration into the capitalist world system. Phrased in an 'operational' manner, Islamoglu calls for a close inter-action between Europeanist and Ottomanist historians in studying the genesis of the 'world system'. Obviously those who engage in this project will need to cope with the tensions between different his-toriographical traditions, not always an easy task.
Appropriating the Ottoman center
'World systems theory', Ottoman style, shows how certain well-estab-lished centers, namely Istanbul and the Aegean coastlands, which together formed the Ottoman core provinces, lost their previous posi-tions and became one of several peripheries linked to a European-dominated world economy.63 Yet this scenario of center-periphery
relations is by no means all that can be said on this issue in the Ottoman context. To the contrary, concentration upon the Ottoman center forms part of a historiographical tendency which was obvi-ous in the 1940s, when 'world systems theory' did not as yet exist and is still very much with us.64 By dint of this 'centralizing'
schol-arly tradition, Turkish historians of the republican period, once the initial distaste for Ottoman history had faded away, 'appropriated' the Ottoman center. From the perspective of Turkish scholars, the wish to 'rehabilitate' the Ottoman Empire undoubtedly was strong, especially after Ottoman victories and cultural florescence had come to be regarded as a source of national pride, from the later 1930s
on-63 On the centrality of the eastern Balkans and western Anatolia for the
func-tioning of the Ottoman Empire, compare Klaus Kreiser, "Uber den Kernraum des Osmanischen Reiches", in Die Tiirkei in Europa, ed. by Klaus-Detlev Grothusen (Got-tingen, 1979), 53-63.
64 Turkish scholars have shown interest in Ottoman borderlands mainly where the sixteenth century is concerned. As an exception to this rule, one might how-ever name Akdes Nimet Kurat, with his focus on late seventeenth and early eigh-teenth-century figures such as Charles XII of Sweden and Peter I of Russia: XII Karl'in Turkiye'de kali$i ve bu siralarda Osmanh Imparatorlugu (Ankara, 1943).
wards. After all, the Ottoman state had been systematically denigrated, both by European authors and by the nationalist discourses current in many of the states formed on previously Ottoman territory.
For the more naive, historians and others, it was the Ottoman Empire's military glory which formed the principal attraction. For the more sophisticated, the interest of Ottoman history lay, and con-tinues to lie, in the possibility of explicating the workings of a major empire, particularly the linkages between state apparatus and a tax-paying society. For until the opening of the Istanbul and Ankara archives, the Ottoman social formation had been very imperfectly known, and misunderstandings abounded. Considerations of ideol-ogy apart, one should not neglect the scholarly impetus to discover a world hitherto little known.
Economies, cultures and local identities in Ottoman provinces
A major break with the historiographical tradition of the Ottoman centuries lay in the attention paid, especially from the 1950s onwards, to individual provinces. Generally, the historians of most states located on previously Ottoman territory tended, and still tend, to concen-trate upon the lands situated within the borders of the modern coun-try within which they happen to operate.63 This makes sense in
practical terms, as in any given state, university positions and research money depend on definitions of 'legitimate' academic study. Minis-terial bureaucracies, to say nothing of the general public, tend to feel that study of the 'national territory', and perhaps of lands to which the relevant government lays claim, should be accorded pri-ority.66 Thus the geographical delimitations of the area to be
inves-tigated are not as innocuous as might be assumed at first glance.
65 This applies also to some foreign scholars: thus one of the present authors
would see herself as a historian of Anatolia.
66 Apart from research in Greek, Bulgarian or Rumanian, there exists a very
considerable literature on the Balkans in English, French and German, which can barely be touched upon here. In the German-speaking territories, this concern with the Balkans doubtless was motivated first by the Habsburg legacy. At least in their later years a German-speaking dynasty, the Habsburgs had acquired, and stubbornly held on to, considerable Balkan territories. Moreover, in both World Wars, Ger-many had possessed Balkan allies and made sizeable conquests in the peninsula. This political situation induced the governments of the time to create an infra-structure for Balkan studies, both within and outside the universities. Balkan studies
